popculturemeetshistory

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

In “Acres of Diamonds,” the connection between the fictional
Dr. Valentin Narcisse (Jeffrey Wright) and the real-life Marcus Garvey became
even more explicit as “Boardwalk Empire” depicts the emergence of the “New
Negro” of the 1920s.Expressing a
philosophy similar to Garvey, Narcisse is clearly a member of his organization,
the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), whose membership peaked
during the first half of the decade.

Before World War I, African Americans remained divided
between two approaches to the problem of racism in the United States.In 1895, facing the rising tide of
segregation and disenfranchisement in the post-Reconstruction South, Booker T.
Washington spoke of accommodation to these new conditions in a speech at the
Atlanta Exposition.Espousing what
became known as the “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington accepted the loss of
African American political rights and suggested that blacks focus on economic
development through vocational training.After this speech, Booker T. became the leading the figure in black
America until his death in 1915, as money from Northern philanthropists flowed
through his schools and institutions.

Not everyone shared Washington’s views.Led by W.E. B. Du Bois, some African
Americans believed that you could not achieve economic progress without political
rights and that they should not abandon the quest for legal equality.Du Bois advocated for blacks to attain higher
education and to fight Jim Crow through the courts.Along with an interracial group of blacks and
whites, he formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) in 1909.

As American involvement World War I began in 1917, some
questioned whether African Americans should fight in President Woodrow Wilson’s
war“to make the world safe for
democracy” when they did not have equal rights at home.Du Bois urged blacks to serve, saying that
participation would give blacks a greater claim on rights once the U.S.
defeated the Central Powers.Indeed,
thousands of blacks served in segregated units during the year-and-a-half the
U.S. fought in the conflict.

Upon returning to the United States following the November
1918 armistice, blacks faced a new wave of attacks.Fearful that black veterans would seek
equality after their service abroad, white Southerners engaged in a violent campaign
to maintain the status quo as 76 blacks were lynched in 1919.That same year, a major race riot broke out
in Chicago after a black boy drowned because angry whites had pelted him with
bricks when he drifted to the white section of the beach.

Feeling that the promises of the war had been broken, a more
militant black community emerged in its aftermath.Dr. Narcisse’s mentions the “New Negro” as he
talks to a group in Harlem early in the episode, a term which reflected more
activist mood of African Americans during the 1920s.Emerging in Northern cities whose black
population had been augmented by the African American migration during the war
and throughout the following decade, the “New Negro” philosophy merged Washington’s
and Du Bois’s views.

Prominently featured on Narcisse’s wall is a poster for
Garvey’s UNIA, which represented the most dramatic manifestation of the “New
Negro.”While the fictional Narcisse
arrived from Trinidad, Garvey came to Harlem from Jamaica and began to espouse
a form of black nationalism and black separatism that appealed to many working-class
blacks in the North.He preached black
self-help, started a shipping company called the Black Star Line, and urged
African Americans to return to Africa.

Garvey, however, faced serious difficulties.His authoritarian leadership of UNIA
alienated allies, as did his meeting the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.Having caught the attention of the young J.
Edgar Hoover, the federal government aggressively pursued Garvey for mail fraud.After his conviction, he served two years in
prison and was then pardoned by President Coolidge in 1927 and deported.Does Narcisse face a similar fate?

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Season two of “Homeland” continues the program’s arc after
the show’s excellent opening set of episodes.In season two, the CIA recalls the seemingly discredited Carrie Mathison
(Clare Danes) back to service to deal with potential retaliatory strikes on the
U.S. after an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Many have described “Homeland” as the “anti-24” and the
contrast can be seen in the interrogation scenes in the two shows.In season one, Saul Berenson (Mandy
Patinkin), eventually draws information out of a suspect after earning her
confidence during a cross-country car trip, rather than torturing her a la Jack
Bauer.Similarly, in season two, Carrie finally
gets American marine turned terrorist Nicholas Brody (Damien Lewis) to confess
by identifying with his post-traumatic stress.Many criticized “24” during its run for oversimplifying the
interrogation process and “Homeland” is much more in line with techniques that intelligence
professionals say usually work, as torture often produces unreliable
information.This evolution is another
manifestation of how the nation has moved away from the tactics of the early
years of the Bush war on terror.

Though the Islamic terrorist threat is the primary focus,
“Homeland” also clearly shows the influence of 1970s thrillers that portray the
government and its intelligent agencies as a danger as well.After Brody moves to assist the CIA to hunt
down the Bin Laden-like Abu Nazir, the Company makes plans to eliminate him
after his work is done.This subplot
consumes a good portion of the final episodes, along with the terrorist threat

Of course, the show does take some entertaining—but absurd—“24”
like twists.In season one, it is clear
that the neoconservative Vice President Walden is a stand-in for Dick Cheney
and the connection becomes even clearer this season when it turns out he has a
pacemaker for his heart problem.In a
bizarre series of evens, Nazir programs the pacemaker to give Walden a heart
attack and kill him in revenge for the drone strike that killed his son (Walden
ordered the attack as CIA director).

“Homeland” also portrays the war on terror’s impact on the
home front.Brody’s PTSD has left him
unable to deal with his wife and family and he goes to the length of giving his
best friend, Mike, permission to resume the relationship he had with his wife
while Brody was presumed dead in Iraq.Brody
believes the war and his captivity has permanently changed him, just as the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars have altered many real-life vets.

As season two concludes, it takes a dramatic twist when the
late Nazir’s network attacks the CIA and make it look like it was the work of
the now reformed Brody.Having started a
romantic relationship, Carrie helps Brody escape the country.Away from Langley at the time of the attack,
it appears Saul will become CIA director and Carrie will serve at his side with
Brody’s role in exonerating himself unclear.With the Abu Nazir plotline concluded, “Homeland,” like other serialized
shows, has revamped key parts of its premise and it will be interesting to see
where the program goes from here.I
might have to get Showtime because I don’t think I can wait a full year to find
out.

More elements of the Roaring Twenties emerged in “Resignation,”
episode two of Boardwalk Empire’s fourth season, First, Van Alden/Mueller’s
wife buys a new couch and other household goods for their home, but the
puritanical Van Alden/Mueller bemoans that they can’t afford it on his
salary.She notes that they can pay for
it over several months rather than all at once.Indeed, the 1920s witnessed a dramatic rise in installment purchases, as
more and more Americans could afford the consumer products of the “New Era” by
using credit.By 1926, customers made 15
percent of all purchases through installment.

In the season premiere, a black ally of Chalky White is trapped
into a bizarre “they like to watch” scheme with a white husband and wife.Angered, he murders the husband and in
“Resignation,” the woman claims she was raped and seeks the help of her late
husband’s employer, Dr. Valentin Narcisse (Jeffrey Wright), a West Indian
immigrant who is a major player in New York.Such rape allegations often led to the lynching of black men in the
South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the peak
period of racial violence in American history.Narcisse notes that her charge will have credibility, given that a woman
of the “Nordic tribe” made the allegation, reflecting the scientific racial
categories of the 1920s.After using the
allegation to extract a share of Chalky’s profits, Narcisse has her killed,
clearly angered by the woman’s desire for vengeance for a clearly false
allegation.Chalky refers to Narcisse as
a “Jamaican,” and though Narcisse says he is from Trinidad, it should be noted that
Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant himself, and his black nationalist group,
the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), were at their peak during this
period.Narcisse tells Chalky about
their common roots going back to Africa, a seeming reference to Garvey’s focus
on pride in African culture.

Toward the end of the episode, J. Edgar Hoover appears in
the early stages of his role of head of the FBI (then Bureau of Investigation).At this time, he was just beginning what
would be a central role in the next half-century of American history.In “Resignation,” he exposes a corrupt
Treasury department official, who responds that Hoover is out of his
jurisdiction and that “I’m not some Bolshevik under the bed,” likely referring
to J. Edgar’s role in the 1919-1920 Palmer Raids against the American Communist
Party during the First Red Scare.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

“Boardwalk Empire” returned this week as the Roaring
Twenties and the concomitant battle over Prohibition continued.The first episode of season four explores a
few of the important issues of that decade as the program moves into 1924.

Eli Thompson’s wife is worried that her college-attending
son is smoking while at school.In the
late 19th and early 20th century, smoking was
concentrated among working-class people and the poor and was seen as uncouth
among middle and upper middle class people.As the Victorian values of that era lost their power during the 1920s,
the stigma on smoking faded and it slowly became a respectable behavior.

Meanwhile, a new character played by Ron Livingstone, has arrived
to bring the Piggly Wiggly chain to Atlantic City.At the time, chain stores were expanding
across the country and putting economic pressure on local mom and pop stores.Such problems existed long before the arrival
of Wal-Mart.

At the conclusion of the episode, Nucky Thompson
is examining real estate papers about property in Manatee County on the Florida
Gulf Coast.The 1920s witnessed a
dramatic rise in interest in real estate in the Sunshine State as a bubble in
land prices eventually burst at the end of the decade.Could Nucky be headed for some poor financial
investments?

Sunday, August 18, 2013

I modestly recommend “Lee Daniel’s The Butler,” which offers
the most thorough feature film depiction of the civil rights movement to
date.Though it often oversimplifies the
period, it exposes the audience to an important set of events that many
Americans are unaware of as we continue to honor the 50th
anniversary of the era, with the celebration of the March on Washington coming
at the end of the month.

The film revolves around the life of Cecil Gaines, played by
Forrest Whitaker, who eventually works as a butler in the White House for three
decades.His story begins in Georgia in
1926, where he and his family live on a cotton plantation.At the opening of the film, a planter rapes
his mother and his father is killed after offering minor protest.Of course, blacks had no recourse to such
violence at that time in the Jim Crow South. After several years working inside
the house at the plantation, Cecil joins millions of other black Americans in
the Great Migration to the North and gets a job a working at a luxury hotel in
Washington D.C.

Hired by the White House in 1957, Cecil watches President
Eisenhower agonize over the crisis in Little Rock, AK, where Governor Orval
Faubus is preventing the court-ordered integration of Central High School.The film accurately shows Ike’s desire for
the South to have more time to implement the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of
Education decision of 1954, but also how he is forced to send federal troops to
enforce the order when Faubus allows a climate of anarchy of prevail in the city.The film is sympathetic to Eisenhower and
does not show his refusal to urge citizens to obey the Brown decision, which
many historians believe offered sustenance to the South’s campaign of “massive
resistance.”

The movie’s central theme is the generational tension
between Cecil and his son Lewis.Like
many of his era, Cecil is reluctant to openly challenge the system because of
the memory of the racial violence he saw in the South (in addition to his
father’s death, he witnessed a lynching as a teenager).Having escaped the worst of the Jim Crow
South, he is content with his life as the movement picks up speed after the
Brown decision. Representing the more militant post-World War II generation,
Lewis wants to challenge the status quo.

Lewis attends Fisk University in Tennessee, one of the
leading historically black colleges that educated blacks during the era of
segregation.While in school, he goes to
James Lawson’s workshops on nonviolence and becomes part of the student sit-in
campaign in Nashville in 1960, which eventually resulted in the desegregation
of public facilities in the city.He
becomes part of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the
fictional character becomes the Forrest Gump of the movement, appearing at all
of the key events of the time, including the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Birmingham
campaign of 1963, and the Selma campaign of 1965.

At the same time, Cecil watches JFK and LBJ deal with the
movement from Washington. “The Butler” shows—albeit in Hollywood fashion—how
the activists moved Kennedy to propose the most far-reaching civil rights bill
in history after the Birmingham police unleashed fire hoses and dogs on
protesters in the city.Following the
assassination, LBJ pushes the final bill through Congress and then proposes the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 after Alabama state troopers violently beat activists
at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.Through his lens, the movie portrays the movement as a grass-roots
phenomenon that involved more than the incredibly important efforts of Martin
Luther King, Jr.

Throughout all of this, Cecil disapproves of Lewis’ behavior
because he breaks the law though his civil disobedience and because he fears
for his son’s life.Indeed, many black
Americans, even leaders of the NAACP, did not support the street protest
tactics of the students because they felt were too dangerous and that change
should come through the courts and legislation.

Like some SNCC activists such as Stokley Carmichael, Lewis
and his girlfriend become disenchanted with the non-violent strategy of Dr.
King during the mid-to-late 1960s, moving closer to Malcolm X’s advocacy of
self-defense.They join the Black
Panthers, although Lewis becomes disenchanted with the group and leaves.At the same time, Cecil hears President Nixon
and his advisers plot the group’s destruction, with references to J. Edgar
Hoover’s COINTELPRO campaign that undermined the Panthers.

Lewis and Cecil continue to be estranged throughout the
1970s and 1980s, even as Lewis enters politics and is elected to Congress.Cecil continues to work into the Reagan years
where he sees the president veto sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa
(Congress overrode the veto).Shortly
thereafter, father and son reconcile and are arrested together at a protest
outside the South African embassy.Such
efforts were common in the 1980s as many movement veterans saw the anti-apartheid
struggle as an extension of their fight during the 1950s and 1960s.

Of course, the film concludes with Gaines living to see the
election of Barack Obama, though his wife, played by Oprah Winfrey, passes away
beforehand.The move concludes with
Cecil going to a meeting with Obama in the White House (though we do not see
him)

The film oversimplifies aspects of the movement, though in
fairness it is a feature film and not a documentary.Moreover, it bizarrely casts very famous
actors as presidents: Robin Williams as Ike, John Cusack as Nixon, and Alan
Rickman as Reagan.It’s almost as if the
filmmakers thought of the actor least likely to play the role and cast
them!Still, they were following the
path laid by the television miniseries “Roots” 35 years ago; if you have a
black-themed project, use prominent white actors in supporting roles.

Indeed, the most important thing about “The Butler” is that
it is a film about African-American issues with black characters in the
lead.Most films about such issues,
whether unbelievably inaccurate (“Mississippi Burning”) or relatively accurate
(“Lincoln”) usually feature whites as protagonists.In “The Butler,” the white characters are
clearly in background. For this reason and for its depiction of the seminal
events of the civil rights era, it is a worthwhile movie.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

I watched
every episode of “Breaking Bad” this summer (I know I’m behind the curve) and have
a few reflections about the show as the second half of the final season begins
on Sunday night.First, I see a strong
undercurrent of class tensions, perhaps reflecting the growing income
inequality in the US in recent years as well as the impact of the Great
Recession.Moreover, even though the
show focuses on the “war on drugs,” the impact of the post-9/11 conflicts is clearly
visible on the characters.

As a highly
educated man with a Ph.D. in chemistry, Walter White represents an idiosyncratic
symbol for the economic struggles of many working and middle class Americans in
recent years.His education should make
him a highly paid professional, but his personal disputes with his grad school
colleagues left him out of an enormously successful business, Gray and
White.As a high school teacher, Walt
struggles to support his family and once he is diagnosed with lung cancer, his
HMO won’t pay for the best health care.Wearing
his sense of resentment on his sleeve, Walt refuses the financial assistance of
his rich friends and even blows up the car of an arrogant wealthy man in season
one.

The Iraq war’s
influence could be seen when White’s DEA brother-in-law Hank is nearly killed
by an IED while working near the Mexican border.Such devices were the weapons of choice for
the insurgents in their fight against American troops.The combination of that trauma as well as
Hank’s shooting of a drug dealer in self-defense leaves him with a serious case
of post-traumatic stress syndrome, like many who have served abroad in America’s
wars over the last decade.

As we head
into the final episodes, it will be interesting to see how executive producer
Vince Gilligan concludes the show.I
predict a very unambiguous ending—i.e., the antithesis of “The Sopranos” or
“Lost.”

Sunday, June 23, 2013

I recommend
“Man of Steel,” which offers a darker take on the Superman story than audiences
have seen in the past.Combining
traditional elements of the mythology with the more serious tone of post-9/11
comic book films, director Zack Snyder and producer Christopher Nolan have
banished the memory of Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns” (2006), reinvigorating
the franchise.

Like the
original “Superman” (1978), the film begins with the depiction of Kal-El’s leaving
Krypton as an infant.With the planet
crumbling, Jor-El, played well by Russell Crowe, puts his only son on a ship to
Earth.After Kal’s departure, the evil General
Zod (“Boardwalk Empire’s” Michael Shannon) kills Jor-El and declares that he
will find his son.

Jor-El’s act
of sending his son away to save him echoes the story of Moses from the Old
Testament and Kal-El means “vessel of G-D” in Hebrew (Tye, 65-66). As I noted
in my previous post on Superman, two Jewish American teenagers from Cleveland
created the character during the 1930s and the influence of their religion and
immigrant experience pervades the tale.The destruction of Krypton can be seen as a metaphor for the Russian
pogroms that forced Jews to leave Eastern Europe in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries or for Europe on the eve of the Second
World War. Once on Earth, the Middle American Kent family adopts and raises
Kal-El as Clark Kent and he tries to assimilate into humanity, but is not truly
one of them, an experience shared by many immigrants who came to the United
States.Indeed, Kal El’s biological mother
fears humans will see him as an “outcast” and a “freak.”For more about Superman’s history, see http://popculturemeetshistory.blogspot.com/2013/06/supermans-history.html

Like “Batman
Begins” (2005) and “Amazing Spider Man” (2012), “Man of Steel" is a much more cynical
examination of its protagonist than previous incarnations.Gone is the whimsy and humor of the Christopher
Reeve films of the 1970s and 1980s, replaced by humanity’s fear of the alien other.In the beginning of the movie, Clark Kent is
working a series of odd jobs, quietly helping people on the way and then
quickly moving on, much like David Banner in the “Incredible Hulk” TV
show.In a series of flashbacks, we see
his adolescent struggles with his powers, which are far more traumatic than
those experienced by Tom Welling’s Clark on TV’s “Smallville” (2001-2011).

As I’ve noted
before, most film franchises have become more serious since 9/11 and one of the
problems with “Superman Returns” was that is so consciously echoed the
sensibility of the original films.Not
so with “Man of Steel.” Indeed, the
climactic action scenes eerily echo 9/11 as we see people fleeing dust and
falling buildings. The contrast between Henry Cavill’s Superman and Christopher
Reeve’s from the late 70s/early 80s is almost as stark as the difference
between Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Roger Moore’s from the late 70s/early 80s.For more, see http://popculturemeetshistory.blogspot.com/2011/09/post-911-popular-culture.html>

Overall, I
very much enjoyed the film, though Snyder could have cut one major action
sequence to make the story tighter.At
the end, Clark begins his traditional job at the Daily Planet, providing a nice
conclusion to the movie and giving us hope that newspapers will still exist
when the sequel debuts.